A cloud mind…

Today’s Dilbert calendar strip got me thinking…imagine if it were possible to upload the contents of your brain for offline storage.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a backup of all your thoughts, memories and things you have learned over the years? Just like when your hard drive crashes on your computer, you might be able to restore your brain to a point in time. How useful would that be for people who get dementia or Alzheimers?

Even if you couldn’t restore to your biological brain mass, perhaps it might be possible to access those memories offline. In the Chrysler Club we often lament the loss of knowledge as former workers at Chrysler pass away and that history is gone forever. Imagine being able to capture all of that stuff and dump it into the cloud somewhere for future generations to access. That would be a great knowledge base to mine.

I can see many applications. Family histories and stories wouldn’t be lost with the passing of each generation. [Then again, indigenous Australians have had their own ‘cloud’ for years by creating and passing on stories down through the generations.]

How good would it be to have access to the thoughts of Plato, Einstein, Hawking and others? How much more could we learn by knowing what really made the likes of Hitler or Stalin tick?

We already have people posting their lives on YouTube for generations to see and to learn from (in some cases, in other cases they might just learn that this generation is just a bunch of narcissistic, self-interested attention seekers). But that’s just a fraction of everything that is and has ever been known. We could capture some of the dying skills for perpetuity in case they are ever needed in the future.

Then again, we still have bugger-all idea how the human brain works, so I guess downloading any of it is probably a way off…but it’s nice to dream and consider the possibilities.